Tag: Scholarly

I kept a link to Beall’s list on my PhD Resources Reddit and received a comment that alerted me to the post (reposted below) which reported the take-down of this incredibly useful resource.

Science itself is under attack by those governments, corporations and gangsters who profit from ignorance: Beall did a great service by “outing” bogus and fake journals who increasingly have been undermining the robust verification and publication of hard science findings.

The comment on the reddit post is available here and calls for a distributed response that is resilient to the challenges that cannot be sustained by one man in academia.

Beall’s blog that listed more than 1000 “potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” now stands blank, and it is not known whether this closure is permanent. While his efforts at exposing fraudulent publishers were applauded by many academics, his list – popularly known as “Beall’s list” – had been a source of controversy as some open access advocates believed that he was negative toward the model. He also received flak from some publishers and journals that objected to being included in his list. One such publisher is OMICS Publishing Group that threatened to sue Beall with a $1 billion lawsuit for defaming the company.

Cabell’s International, a publishing services company, had announced that it has been working with Beall since 2015 to develop a blacklist of publishers. Hence, there has been some speculation as to whether this was the reason behind pulling down of Beall’s blog. However, the company publicly stated that it is not involved with this incident. The shutdown of Beall’s blog is perceived by many as a loss to academia. Though it received considerable criticism for being overly biased, it was unique in the industry and many researchers considered it to be a valuable resource. It remains to be seen what effect the closedown of this blog has on academic publishing.